The following terms are abbreviated as follows within this specification: Endometrioid Carcinoma 1 (ECA1), T Cell Factor (TCF), Lymphocyte Enhancing Factor (LEF), Differential Display Reverse Transcriptase (DDRT), Heparan-Sulfate Proteoglycans (HSPG).
Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death among women in the United States and has the highest mortality rate of all gynecologic cancers. Greenlee, R. T. et al., Cancer Statistics, 2001. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 51(1):15-36. The prognosis for survival from ovarian cancer is largely dependent upon the extent of disease at diagnosis. Women diagnosed with local disease are over 3 times more likely to survive 5 years than women with distant disease. However, only one fourth of women present with localized disease at diagnosis. Ries, L. A. et al., (1998), SEER Cancer Statistics Review 1973-1995, Bethesda, Md.: National Cancer Institute.
Ovarian and other gynecological malignancies can be the result of acquired or inherited genetic alterations. Maintenance of a malignant phenotype requires sustained expression of important transforming genetic alterations. Alterations in several genes are described for endometrial and ovarian carcinomas. These alterations include mutations in ras (Enomoto, T. et al. (1990) Cancer Res. 50:6139-6145), β-catenin (Ignar-Trowbridge, D. et al. (1992) Am. J. Obstet. Gynecol. 167:227-232), PTEN (Caduff, R. F. et al. (1995) Am. J. Pathol. 146:182-188), p 53 (Ito, K. et al. (1996) Gynecol. Oncol. 63:238-246), DNA-repair defects manifested as mircosatellite instability (Risinger, et al. (1993) Cancer Res. 53:5100-5103) as well as gene amplification in c-myc (Jasano et al. (1990) Cancer Res. 65:1545-1551) and HER-2/neu (Saffari et al. (1995) Cancer Res. 55:5693-5698.). Some of these genetic alterations are strongly associated with specific histologic types of carcinoma found in either endometrium or ovary (Saegusa et al. (2001) J. Pathol. 194:59-67; Sasano, H. et al. (1990) Cancer Res. 53:5100-5103; and Enomoto, T. et al. (1991) Am. J. Pathol. 139:777-785).
Despite the numerous examples of biomarkers shown to be associated with various cancers, the usefulness of such tools for therapeutic diagnostic, prognostic and other detection applications are limited in that they have been shown to be ineffective, unreliable, lacking in sensitivity and/or predictiveness. Thus, there exists a continuing need to identify antigens, antigenic epitopes and other biomarkers associated with cancer and to develop new materials and kits to aid in the early detection, therapy and monitoring of related cancers. The present invention satisfies this need for endometrioid carcinomas such as ovarian cancer and provides related advantages as well.